So, the title of this work is a BIT misleading. It IS a story about Ginger and I, and yes, we did have an adventure at Comicon...but it's not like we were absolute strangers. We knew each other in college, but that was twenty years ago. The girl I knew then was a much different person than the woman I met that day.
I'm Logan, which is a great name to have when you go to Comic book conventions. No, I do not cosplay that particular character, mostly because knife hands make normal human interaction rather difficult and I'm a people person. At a Comicon my fashion sense is what I call dressy nerdcasual. Blazer over a nerd t-shirt, nice jeans, Chuck Taylor all-star Converse in various colors, low cut to show off nerd themed socks that if I'm really on my game will compliment or share a fandom with the shirt I have on. I stand tall at six foot three, I have sandy brown hair, blue eyes, of course I have a beard, but I actually take CARE of my facemonster, thankyouverymuch, and thanks to a lifelong addiction to martial arts I have a pretty good physique for someone who spends as much time reading comics and sitting in front of a computer as I do.
I am the producer of a local podcast and so we get tables at a lot of comic conventions just to help spread our visibility and grow our listenership. You should totally listen too, the hosts are funny and insightful, and it's well put together if I do say so myself. The great thing about that is the fact that I get access to the convention floor during the setup phase, which is the best time to meet the people who run the booths, offer a helping hand, and maybe get a discount later when you come by at the very END of convention when they are about to start taking stuff down and that one collectors item you had your eye on is still on their table.
What can I say, I have an eye for both memorabilia AND for bargains. Plus, you can usually get a picture with some of the celebrities before they charge you for it. Then once the floor opens to the public it's a flurry of activity as we all take turns manning our little table with flyers and taking breaks to walk the floor and check out all the great cosplayers. I am the official photographer for our group, so I take the people watching part of the job pretty seriously. I am naturally the gregarious sort, so I don't have to worry about social anxiety the way a lot of members of the geek community seem to, and I always get consent before taking a photo of anyone. Then I get to tell them that if they want to see the photo I just took to head over to the website for our podcast. It's marketing! I turned onto the main expressway on the convention floor about to head down to Artist Alley when I first spotted her, which really is a feat in and of itself.
Ginger is not a tall woman.
Her blazing red hair was the giveaway that I had noticed from across the convention floor. Yes, her name is Ginger and she IS a ginger. She was wearing a super cute blue TARDIS dress that featured a plunging neckline, the skirt flared out from her hips and went down to her knees, showing off her cute and petite build. She had on cats-eye glasses and a VIP lanyard that told me that she had paid a lot of money to meet an actor I had gotten to chat up and had a selfie with before the convention started, and she was talking to one of the anime artists. I walked over and waited for her to finish her conversation, standing just out of her field of vision, and I started to sing a choir song from our college days.
I love watching the moment of dawning realization on people, and it was tremendously satisfying to see Ginger move to walk away from the table, hear me softly singing, pause, straighten, then finally turn around to see me. Her reaction after that was equally priceless. She squealed in delight and taking a two-step running start jumped up at me in a flying hug. I barely had enough time to slide my camera to the side and prepare to catch her, but again, a lifetime of martial arts training served me well in that I have good reflexes. I caught her around the waist and she wrapped her arms around me. I set her down and we spent the next ten minutes just gushing through the 'Oh my Gawd how are you?' and 'I can't believe it's been THAT long since college' bit of catching up when I got a buzz telling me that a panel I was wanting to go see was half an hour from opening its doors.
That would leave me just enough time to get a quick bite to eat and walk over to that part of the convention center. I asked if Ginger would be interested in accompanying me, and she was, so we went off to the food court, got some grease bombs and walked over to the panel breakout rooms. We weren't the first ones in line, but neither were we in danger of not getting a seat. We ate our food and talked about our shared fandoms as we waited in line, then as the room opened and we went inside to take our seats Ginger headed all the way to the back of the room, the very last row, and sat in the middle of it.
Now, this was the second panel of the first day of a three-day convention. It was about podcasting, a pretty niche crowd, and the only reason I was here was because nobody else at our table wanted to go, but also thought someone should be there in case there was good info. Suffice to say that there was NO way this room was going to be full, in fact everyone else that was waiting in line was already inside and sitting in the first third of the seats. I really hadn't expected Ginger to want to come along, and now that she had taken us all the way to the back of the room. But soon I realized it was because she wanted to keep chatting with me and didn't want to disturb the rest of the people in attendance. Fair enough.
We quietly conversed as the presenters took the stage and started to go through their presentation. I realized that I had already heard everything these folks were going to talk about at a different event a year earlier, so I quickly tuned them out and focused instead on the cute redhead sitting to my right. It had been nearly twenty years since we had seen each other in college, and to be honest, even back then we weren't fast friends. We were acquainted the way all people are who go to a small college, but we also were in choir together, so that gave us a lot of ground to work through, singing snippets of the more memorable songs we had learned all those years back and giggling when we harmonized. It was good to catch up with her, but to be honest I was starting to run out of songs, and the panel was wrapping up.
People started getting up to leave, but we just kept sitting there and our conversation just kept going. Finally, the last other person left in the room got off his phone and walked to the door and left. As soon as the door closed behind him Ginger paused in the middle of whatever sentence she had been saying about one of her old roommates her freshman year and said, "Finally, some privacy!" She stood up, kicked her leg over mine and straddled me, giving me a brief flash at some colorful panties, and as she sat back down on top of me she pulled my chin down by grabbing a handful of my beard and pulled our lips together in a hungry kiss.
NOT what I was expecting.
